Archive for the ‘mktg’ tag

INDIA: Passion empowers us as people. To try harder. To be more courageous. To live our truths. At Fountainhead MKTG, we love the way a passionate person lights up the room they’re in and infects us all with a contagious energy. What we’re passionate about defines us for who we are. And that’s why we wanted to celebrate the most passionate amongst us –to celebrate who they are and what the impact their passion has on each of us.

At the 2017 Fountainhead MKTG Awards, we presented our winners with Passion Point Falcons as a commemoration of their commitment to what they do.

We had nine nominees, from aspiring singer to master angler to individuals who rock the stage. But our winners this year were Amit Arolkar, who finds his passion in restoring the classic Italian beauty, Vespa scooters; and Keith D’Souza and Joshua Pereira, who have started a weekend food delivery service to cater to the taste buds of many.

See below for images and have a look at our nominees and their work. Also a sneak peek into the award night.

Abhishek Alekar while mastering the art of angling

Amit Arolkar- For the love of old classic scooters, Amit has founded the Scooter’s Head, Bombay Club

LeBron James changed my life.

Every year during the NBA playoffs, he takes a break from social media to 100% focus on the game with the aim of taking home another championship. His social media blackout has been officially coined “Zero Dark 30” and rather than tweet, he posts an image with the hashtag #StriveForGreatness.

Well…much to my total surprise, during the 2017 playoffs, he chose my work to grace his page the entire playoffs.

MKTG’s Elliot Gerard and John “Graph” Boyce’s piece chosen by LeBron during the 2017 NBA Finals

Right then and there, I knew that my life was about to change and I had to seize the moment and truly Strive or Greatness. And just like LeBron does, I would give every ounce of myself to make sure I could do so.

I was already somewhat established as an artist in the sports industry working with teams like the Knicks and media brands like ESPN. I knew I could do more though.

This was an opportunity to take the ball and run with it.

I reached out to organizations like Sports Illustrated, Turner Sports and most importantly The Cleveland Cavaliers and to see if they could be a part of this journey. There were many people that told me they were not interested or did not respond. But every time I would look at LeBron’s post, it fueled me to continue to strive for greatness.

The Cavaliers were the first to get back to me. After talking with their lead art director, Kevin Johnson on the phone, we were already coming up with the idea of creating a mural that helped recapture the energy of my image that LeBron had chosen.

I had created the original image in collaboration with a talented artist John “Graph” Boyce, so I made sure that he was a part of any project centered around the Zero Dark 30. Keeping the authenticity of the original piece in all artwork we created together for this campaign was key.

While each playoff round went by, the more nervous I got. However, as the Cavaliers looked more and more likely to reach their straight third trip to the Finals, and LeBron’s historic 7th straight trip, things started to come into place. With no budget for a PR team, I spent many late nights reaching out and finding ways to get interviews with podcasts, publications and blogs. Then slowly, we started booking projects for media outlets like FanSided and Bleacher Report, creating artwork celebrating LeBron’s historic run to the finals.

The major turning point came when the Cavaliers called me after winning Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals with the final approval on the project. We were asked to create a mural coined “Defend the Land” of the entire Cavaliers team interacting with the cityscape and literally defending the city of Cleveland. This larger-than-life piece would be displayed outside of The Q Arena (and in front of the entrance to the Cavaliers’ Fan Fast) for games 3 and 4 of the NBA Finals.

I honestly couldn’t have dreamt of a bigger honor. And while it was hard for me to believe this string of events was real, it was time to get to work. Graph and I spent multiple all-nighters getting all the artwork ready, and wouldn’t rest until every piece had achieved greatness.

The mural at The Q (Quicken Loans Arena) — Home of the Cavs

Next up, it was wheels up to Cleveland for the mural unveiling. Besides personally needing to be there to see this moment in person, the Cavs organization made it even more special having me interviewed by local news outlets and making a big deal out of the piece. The most enjoyment I got, however, was watching the fans take pictures in front of the artwork get excited and inspired before the game.

Getting to “The Land” was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure… I was far from done though.

“Strive For Greatness” was now my philosophy. For so many years I was okay being unsatisfied with my day job and putting all my energy into my personal side sports art business. No more – I wanted to be a part of a winning culture, merge my passions with my career and be a leader in my industry.

MKTG was an agency I had freelanced for and they had always impressed me not only with their top-notch clients, but also with the excellent culture they displayed. I knew if the opportunity arose, MKTG was the company I could continue this journey with.

Before LeBron James chose my artwork, I would not have even thought to reach out and engage them to discuss joining the team. But I had the confidence I had always been seeking and know that my passion could add another dimension to the already great team I had worked with. A few months later, as I sit at my desk at MKTG as VP/Creative Director, I realize that the moment I learned that my work was chosen by someone I’ve always admired, that it was time to take a leap and change my life.

Thank you LeBron James. You opened my eyes and lit a fire within me. I will always continue to heed your words. The striving never ends and greatness always awaits.

In 2017, MKTG West decided to up-level their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts from ad-hoc volunteer projects to a streamlined strategic partnership. A committee came up with a litmus test for identifying potential non-profit partners to work with and focus on, with over 40 organizations making the cut. The team then selected 10 non-profits to interview based on shared company values, and the office community voted on 1 of 3 finalists.

We are happy to report that the selected partner was the Bayview Hunters Point Youth Center for Arts and Technology (BAYCAT).

BAYCAT provides access, education, and employment for low-income youth and young adults and women of color, tackling the lack of diversity in technology and digital media.

The Bayview Hunter’s point neighborhood of San Francisco is a historically marginalized and economically disadvantaged community. During the past 10 years, BAYCAT has managed to recruit and educate over 4,000 students; their recent graduates have gone on to work at Netflix, Lucasfilm, Pixar, HBO, Universal Studios and other production and tech companies.

In 2017 MKTG West donated strategic planning, account management, and production hours to help BAYCAT with the many events they host, building awareness of their org and mission and promoting the great work their students are producing. One such event was their Zoom in 38 Winter Showcase on December 7th, 2017 at the Baywview Opera House in San Francisco.

MKTG Staff assisted with everything from pre-event logistics and planning, registration, stage management, and survey collection. It was a night of innovative and truthful media and musical performance, and gave the community a chance to hear firsthand from their youth about displacement in San Francisco, technology’s impact on social activism, and building intersectional communities.

In 2018 the MKTG West team plans to continue this strategic partnership with continued support of BAYCAT’s event planning, participating with their student academy via mentoring and guest lecturing, hiring BAYCAT studio for client projects, and filling a seat on their board of directors. Click here to watch BAYCAT founder Villy Wang’s Ted@IBM talk, where she explains how and why she developed the BAYCAT social enterprise model.

The MKTG team was busy over the holiday break staging the NHL Centennial Fan Arena in NYC! NHL fans had a chance to enjoy watching youth hockey players participating in clinics on a custom pop-up ice rink, see the Stanley Cup up close and personal and tour the main attraction which was a 53-foot museum truck with a 1,000 sq ft interior showcasing digital displays, interactive videos, memorabilia and unique photo moments. The Fan arena was exactly what New York needed to get ready for an incredible Winter Classic!

Yesterday members of MKTG NY spent the afternoon volunteering at Gods Love We Deliver packaging food for those in need. The mission of GLWD is to help alleviate hunger and malnutrition by delivering over 7,000 nutritious meals daily to those who are suffering from serious illness. We are thrilled to support such a great cause and look forward to continuing to do so in 2018!

It’s that time again! Time to get to know another one of our amazing #HumansofMKTG. To finish off the year, we’re taking a look at a day in the life of Ryan Wagner, our Baltimore-based Guinness Brewery Ambassador.

What exactly does it mean to be a Guinness Brewery Ambassador?

Well, there’s a team of nine of us around the country, we divide up the country evenly. My territory is Maryland, DC, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. It’s our job to kind of spread the gospel of Guinness in any way that we can. So it’s mainly focused on education, and whether that’s getting in front of the sales team at a distributer, or getting in front of the bartending staff at an on-premise account and making sure that they’re up to date on Guinness’s quality standards and pouring techniques and all those things. Then it’s also designing consumer-facing events. I’m working with the Maryland Zoo for instance, in creating a program surrounding live zoo animals and the animals that are on the Gilroy posters from Guinness. So I do whatever I can to increase awareness of the things that we’re doing and making sure that everyone is as educated as possible about the world of beer. Not just the world of Guinness, because if people are smarter drinkers, then we hope that’ll lead them to Guinness anyway. And then also because I’m based in Baltimore and our new brewery is being built here, I’ve been spending a lot of time helping everybody get up to speed at the brewery and in the taproom as well.

The cat that’s “probably screaming”

Would you tell us a little bit about your morning routine?

Because I work primarily with staff at bars and restaurants and things like that, I tend to use my mornings to get caught up on admin work, whether that’s responding to emails or dealing with expenses. So I usually take my time in the mornings because, more often than not, I know it’s going to be a later evening. I’ll spend the earlier part of the day working on the busy work.

What about first thing when you wake up in the morning? The before work stuff…

Oh my goodness. I hit the snooze button like 17 times. I deal with the cat that’s probably screaming at me. If it’s the day my fiancé doesn’t open the gym where she works, then I’ll get up and make breakfast for us. If she’s already gone and it’s just me then breakfast is something really simple like cereal. Then I sit down and turn the TV to CNN or ESPN and get caught up on what’s going on in the world. Finally, I open the computer and get to work.

Are you a big podcast listener?

Occasionally I’ll listen to a couple of the beer podcasts. Some of the stuff that the guys at Beervana do or Good Beer Hunting to, again, keep up with what’s going on in the market.

Do you have any go-to lunch spots?

Yeah, Smoothie King! When you work in beer, and you know you’re going to be drinking a lot of it, you know a lot of your calories for the day are going to be coming from beer. So you have to try to keep it light for lunch. It’s not always easy, but if there’s a Smoothie King around I try to have that for lunch.

What about an after work activity? Do you have a favorite?

Spending time with my fiancé. We both work a lot. Depending on the time of year I work three or four jobs and she’s busy as well. She’s a group fitness director for a regional chain of athletic clubs so my favorite activity is literally something as simple as an SVU marathon and laying on the couch and just being around each other.

So you said you’re typically working 3-4 jobs at a time, can you tell us a little more about what those are?

Yeah it’s quite a few things! My background is really varied. Obviously, Guinness is my fulltime job and where I spend the majority of my time. In addition to the experience I have working with beer, I have a couple other part-time gigs that are a lot of fun that I like to do whenever I have the opportunity to. One of them is teaching a class called Body Pump, which is a group fitness weight-training class. So I’ll typically do that once or twice a week it’s usually early in the morning where I’ll go to the gym and teach a class. And then I also work for the local CBS radio affiliate in Baltimore doing sports talk radio. So I’ll do that a few times a month, where I’ll pick up a few hours and go in and talk sports. Then I also work for the Orioles when they’re in season. I am the announcer at the ballpark at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, so I’m the public address announcer at the stadium.

So let’s say the Orioles are in season, what does your workweek look like?

I mean it depends. So they’re home 81 times a year typically for anywhere from 3-10 days in a row at a time so it really just varies from week to week. But if I’m working all of my jobs simultaneously, which doesn’t happen terribly often, I might wake up at 5am to go teach a 6am class. I’d get back to the house at 7:30, have breakfast, and work on some admin stuff until it’s time to go on the road and go do my Guinness day. I’d visit a couple of accounts, do a staff training, work with bartenders on Perfect Pour, meet with a distributor. I’d meet with my distributor manager, see what’s going on for the week with him. Then I would be at the ballpark by 5 or 5:30. The game would start at 7. I’m there until 10. Then there are days where I go right from the ballpark to the radio station to do 10:30 until midnight on the radio. Again, it doesn’t happen often but if I’m doing all four in one day that’s what it’d look like.

It was a pleasure speaking with Ryan about life as a Guinness Brewery Ambassador, sports announcer, group-fitness instructor, and radio host. You can keep up with Ryan on Instagram and Twitter @rwags614 or just catch him at the Orioles home games next season.

Now that we’re wrapping-up 2017 A Day In The Life pieces, I highly recommend closing your year by sitting down with a colleague you don’t know so well and getting to know them better. It’s a privilege to hear the stories of the people we surround ourselves with every day. One thing’s for sure, MKTG is full of some pretty amazing humans. – MaryKate

You spoke about our work with IBM at the recent EventTech conference in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. Can you share a few things to help those of us that couldn’t attend get a feel for your talk and also some key take aways from EventTech in general?

MKTG was at EventTech to share our integrated activation framework for IBM, and how over the last 3 years we have helped raise their social game through influencers and content made to share to better amplify tentpole partner events like the US Open, the Tony Awards and Pebble Beach, which are used by the client to demonstrate their technology expertise and build relationships with clients and prospects.

Overall it was a privilege to share MKTG’s success with IBM to a larger audience, and our approach to earned media is both a differentiator and a proven model that unlocks significant incremental value and amplification, and which is now applied across their partner portfolio.

How long was your presentation and were you solo?

I had planned on attending this session with our IBM client, but she was unable to travel at the last minute so I handled our presentation solo.

At EventTech we shared our philosophy of leveraging not just official partner content and feeds from IBM’s marquee sponsorships, but the idea that we enlist credible 3rd party influencers and their social graphs and feeds to personalize their sponsorships, and earn the partnerships exponentially more conversations and sharing. Now, if you plan and execute events with a social mindset, you can unlock thousands of pieces of user generated content and tens of millions of incremental media impressions.

What major subjects did you cover? Did you get any great questions from the audience?

Best part of our presentation was our strategic framework to the larger event model, whereas most of the audience was focused on the physical, live aspects of wiring events to capture content and share, our approach stood out as a pre/during/approach social mindset to events as much as model to harness conversation and sharing. Truth is brands always have tons of incremental content and conversations earned which flow out of and around events, the trick is typically that value dissapates like so much heat and light. Now, it’s incumbent on MKTG as an agency partner to wire events to be shared to benefit the brand, using unified hashtags like #WatchPartyIBM and incenting people to share and spread the word at scale, it’s the difference between a great one off event for a small handfull, vs social conversations that travel across hundreds of personal feeds.

What were three key things you learned from the show floor? What was hot, and what was less impressive?

Augmented reality was everywhere, especially with the new AR kit in the latest Apple OS, and supporting tech to facilitate onsite sharing via hotspots and beacons, but still felt more like it was all a great tech coming than stuff which is actually here yet. Lots of innovative camera rigs and technology to seamlessly stitch together 360 content, as fostering greater ways of personal, camera first storytelling from multiple POVs becomes the new model.

Overall, what were your impressions of the event?

Event Tech Live was overall a very well run event, 3 full days of content, tech and partner overviews, as everyone in the space (client and agency) navigates the ongoing revolution. Definitely much smaller an event than CES, but a great vibe and positive forum, and great reception to our thinking and approach to maximizing event impact through digital and social, as we were all from the same dedicated audience of experts in live & experiential meets tech – the show itself was probably attended by over 500, with a large standing exhibition space and 5 separate break out stages, which was larger than I had expected.

In September, MKTG Charlotte partnered with a local restaurant in Uptown Charlotte, 204 North, to host a fundraiser for the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund. They chose a day and time frame where 15% of all food and beverage sales were donated to the fund. They pushed the fundraiser in many ways to raise the most money possible, including creating a graphic to distribute, spreading the word on social and inviting family and friends to attend! In total, the MKTG efforts resulted in $200 raised for Hurricane Harvey relief!

Brands with smaller budgets need to be “fearless” when it comes to sponsorship marketing, Colin O’Toole, marketing manager for the Cadbury Premier League Partnership, has said.

He added that businesses also need to put their trust in the agencies they work with and make sure they are fully behind the strategy.

O’Toole was speaking on a panel held by MKTG today called The experience economy: driving business value through sponsorship and shared experiences.

He said: “We have a lot of smaller brands and they don’t have the budget that Cadbury has [such as Green & Blacks]. You need to focus on what you are trying to do, so on one metric and [be brilliant on that].

“Be fearless about what you’re trying to do. If you don’t take a risk you’re going to get lost, but there’s a fine line between fearlessness and stupidity. You’ve got to trust agencies that they will do their job and give you the best advice and then you have to back them.”

O’Toole explained that the campaigns that Cadbury’s has been able to deliver successfully are ones that the brand has “pushed the boat out a little” but has remained within its values.

To support Timberland’s launch of the new FLYROAM sneakerboots, MKTG sought to produce a unique, integrated event that would function seamlessly online and onsite. On October 3, Timberland was really aiming high, so that its consumers, having purchased and challenged the odds in a contest, were able to take part in the first ‘Concert In The Sky’ where they would enjoy with the Milan rapper Marracash, on a suspended platform 40 meters high.

Over 2,000 people gathered at Porta Genoa’s Gateway to witness a never-before-seen happening. The event sparked viral stories, videos, and selfies on social media. The King of Milanese Rap moved smoothly inside the flying platform and put on a fantastic show that spectators on the ground were able to watch on screens over the stage, where Marracash later finished his performance.